A6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021
headache, plugged ears and a
stuffy nose. A coronavirus test
confirmed a breakthrough case.
She went back to the classroom in
early October, recovered but ex-
hausted and frustrated: “I’m mad
that people won’t get vaccinated
and that this stupid virus contin-
ues.”
When David Moore Williams
took the reins of his horse and
lined up behind the Democrats at
Kalispell’s July Fourth parade, he
wanted to get along, he said. The
biggest parade in the Flathead
was back after a pandemic hiatus,
with a new sponsor promising a
celebration and a charitable
cause everyone could rally
around, the local veterans food
pantry.
“This is really neat, two oppos-
ing people, side by side,” the
retired tile contractor said he
thought to himself as they started
down Main Street. He charged
toward the Democratic float at
one point, he insisted, to show off
the majesty of his horse, not to
scare anyone.
Afterward, in a Facebook post,
he called it a “perfect day” and
said it was “awesome” to hear the
Democrats booed the entire pa-
rade. He accused Democrats of a
“terrorist campaign” to discredit
him, but his action had scattered
more discord.
The owners of Sacred Waters
Brewery, whose banner Williams
had displayed on the side of his
wagon, were flooded with calls
from furious residents threaten-
ing to boycott their business.
They apologized on Facebook two
days later for “mixing beer and
politics” and said they didn’t
know the wagon had flown a
Trump flag.
The “most important patriotic
holiday” had been tarnished by
partisanship, local liberal blogger
James Connor wrote. “Let’s do
better next year.”
Williams, 62, moved here 16
years ago from Los Angeles with
his wife, Christina, a nd their six
children, after a split-second de-
cision during a family vacation in
Glacier National Park. “Lost An-
geles,” he called it even then.
Montana was a refuge from the
shootings and the crowding in
the “communist state of Califor-
nia,” he said.
Williams said he saw Trump as
an underdog, bullied in office by
liberals who resented his unor-
thodox style. He believes the No-
vember election was stolen from
the former president. Yet he says
he was not much interested in
national politics even last year.
This year, though, he noticed
changes in the valley. Housing
prices were exploding. Down-
town Kalispell had become a
crush of traffic, starting at sun-
rise, with drivers more impatient
than ever.
Williams blames the newcom-
ers — the valley has grown by 15
percent in the past decade — for
bringing big-city problems here.
He assumes, though he acknowl-
edges that he has no way of
knowing, that they’re Democrats.
His Facebook post delighting
in the dust-up at the parade has
disappeared. In its place he
shares anti-vaccine comments,
including an entry with a false
claim that Biden is denying Social
Security, unemployment and oth-
er benefits to unvaccinated peo-
ple. “It’s becoming a Nazi state,”
he wrote.
H e calls the posts “an expres-
sion of my personal beliefs” as
opposed to political statements.
But he credits the parade push-
back for one political develop-
ment: He’s now attending month-
ly meetings of the Flathead Re-
publicans. “Seeing how organized
the other side is, I’m not going to
sit around,” he said. “I’m so fresh
to this. I’m becoming political.”
As the community wrestles
with the spike in suicides, every-
one says it’s time to put divisions
aside. In a p odcast this month, a
local evangelical pastor gave a
primer on “The Lost Art of Civil
Discourse” and how to talk to
people you disagree with instead
of yelling or walking away.
“Our community has lost com-
munity,” Kevin Geer, who leads a
local congregation of 4,000 at
Canvas Church in Kalispell, said
in an interview. He’s angry, t oo, at
extremists he says are polluting
religion with ugly politics:
“They’ve hi jacked the conversa-
tion.”
Even as the community dis-
agrees over the causes, local po-
lice, school and health officials
have revived a task force devoted
to suicide prevention and say
they are committed to getting
more mental health experts.
No one knows exactly what led
the teenagers to end their lives.
But people here are thinking:
What if the adults in the Flathead,
with all their anger, have provid-
ed a terrible example for the
children?
“We’re such a highly wounded
community right now,” said Kyle
Waterman, a gay city councilman
who received training this year in
making a citizen’s arrest in case
he feels physically threatened.
“It’s been hard to show people
we’re here for our kids.”
[email protected]wrote a letter to the school board
and posted it on Facebook, beg-
ging board members not to give
in to pressure to rescind the
mandate.
“None of the students I know
love masks, but it’s n ot a big deal,
at least we are IN SCHOOL!”
Elliott wrote. “Please don’t ask
this of me. For 26 years, I have
given everything I could to the
students I teach, to the districts I
work for, even the state of Mon-
tana. This is not something I can
do for anyone.”
S he knocked on doors asking
voters to defeat the slate of chal-
lengers. They were running on
one major issue — masks — but
others surfaced. One candidate
wrote in a local paper that the
district needed “trustees that are
alert and on a constant lookout
for the far-left activist, cancel
culture and communist agenda
that is creeping it’s [sic] way into
our schools.”
Four of the five challengers
were defeated. “Most of the par-
ents still trusted in the public
schools,” Elliott said. A lifelong
Democrat from the old union
town of Anaconda, she had al-
ways voted for Republicans when
she liked them, including Marc
Racicot and Judy Martz for gover-
nor. Now she has become a party-
line voter, just like almost every-
one else. “I used to look at the
human being,” Elliott said. “But I
can’t do it anymore. I just cannot.”
Other public servants had also
found themselves in the
crosshairs. The county library di-
rector gave up, resigning in July
to take a job in more liberal
Tacoma, Wash., after clashing
with parents over mask and so-
cial distancing mandates and
with the library board over a
children’s book about two gay
men who fall in love. The book
survived in the collection after a
formal appeal from a parent, but
it stirred resentments.
Elliott, newly married, re-
turned to her classroom Sept. 1,
vaccinated and wearing a mask.
But the district had made face
coverings and quarantines op-
tional to avoid a repeat of last
year’s hostilities, and few of her
students have protected them-
selves. By the second week of
school, coronavirus cases were
mounting among students and
staff.
Within a few days, Elliott had aTrump and a booth selling $
photos with the “Legally Elected
President in Exile.”
Bukacek found the messages
heartening, she said. “The major-
ity of people in the valley think
like I do. If it was this terrible
pandemic, we’d be seeing people
drop dead.” She still maintains
that the number of deaths from
the virus has been wildly inflated
to justify lockdowns.
Despite her denial, the Flat-
head Valley has been a coronavi-
rus hot spot since the summer,
with 1,130 active cases as of Friday
and a vaccination rate of 45 per-
cent. The rising illness gave Kari
Elliott pause in September as she
started her 27th year teaching
fourth-graders in Kalispell. Last
year, she had watched the pan-
demic tear her school apart.
In February, with the virus
seeming to ease, Republican Gov.
Gianforte lifted statewide mask
requ irem ents imposed by his
predecessor, Democrat Steve
Bullock. But the district kept its
mandate, a decision that led to
the first contested races for the
nonpartisan school board that
anyone could remember, with
five incumbents facing challeng-
ers for positions that had often
gone begging for volunteers.
Elliott, 49, panicked that she
would be unprotected in her
clas sroom. She was newly en-
gaged, nine years after her first
husband died in a car crash. She
updated her will and life insur-
ance policy just in case. Then shewrote. (Most local schools stayed
open through the pandemic.)
Bukacek’s visibility infuriated
many, and petition drives arose
early on to remove her from the
county health board and, in reac-
tion, to keep her there. The board
never put the issue on its agenda
for discussion.
Kalispell’s former health direc-
tor, Joe Russell, came out of re-
tirement to temporarily run the
department after two successors
fled, worn out by toxic politics
that included Bukacek’s increas-
ing sway. At his urging, the coun-
ty attorney’s of fice and the health
board ordered her not to repre-
sent herself as a health official
when she speaks publicly on the
pandemic.
On a Saturday in late July, she
drove two hours to a park in St.
Regis, a tiny town famous for its
cherries, for a tent revival. Activ-
ists piled in from conservative
strongholds around Montana,
eastern Idaho and eastern Wash-
ington. She hugged friends and
settled into a lawn chair as a
lineup of speakers exhorted a
crowd of hundreds, some armed,
to fight Biden’s “socialist state”
and take back their freedoms. The
headliners were mostly state law-
makers, past and present.
The organizers dubbed their
event the “Red Pill” after a phrase
in the film “The Matrix” that
confers enlightenment to the
trut h. A woman walked by in a
shirt that read, “It’s Okay to be
White.” There was cutout ofreporter during his campaign for
the House back in 2017. (He
would later be elected governor
after an endorsement from
Trump, who praised Gianforte’s
violence.)
Fisher felt her local party was
abandoning a pillar of the Repub-
lican platform: to support the
rule of law. She launched a weekly
podcast in a tiny office-turned-re-
cording studio, draping rugs and
pillows over a table to mute noise.
The 53rd episode of “Montana
Values” aired last week.
She pulls no punches, bashing
Republicans who swept state-
wide offices as “criminals and
unlikeables” and the ultraconser-
vatives who now dominate the
state legislature as “wackadoo
righty-rights” and bemoaning
Montana’s party-line voting as
the extinction of a tradition of
“middles who care who the candi-
date is as a human being.”
When the 90-day state legisla-
tive session convened in January,
the Flathead committee chair-
man, now representing the valley
in Helena, introduced a bill to
prohibit transgender women and
girls from competing on publicly
funded women’s athletic teams. It
was the first shot in a blitz of
conservative policy changes un-
der one-party rule.
“Will this be in our schools
when ‘Govt Checkpoint’ John
Fuller starts his pre-athletic fe-
male-only sex organ checks?”
Fisher chastised on Twitter ,
retweeting a grainy photo of a
medical exam table.
Fuller punched back in a letter
to the editor, claiming his legisla-
tion would ensure equality for
women in sports. “I’m a conserva-
tive,” Fisher says, “But there’s
times I feel like a political or-
phan.”
Politics “is taking up a bigger
part of our brains now because
it’s become street politics,” she
said. Fisher is not persuaded her
community can come together on
any front. “If there’s somebody I
hate in a room, I’ve never felt
compelled to tell them how much
I hate them.” Now she does.
Annie Bukacek became the
face of the coronavirus resistance
here from an unlikely post at t he
county health board, to which she
had been named weeks before the
first covid-19 cases appeared in
2020.
A physician with a local family
practice, Bukacek defied accept-
ed science to rail against quaran-
tines and masks at protests and
health board meetings. She told
her congregation, Liberty Fellow-
ship, led by a Florida pastor who
had brought an anti-government
vision of Christianity to Kalispell,
that the Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention was pressur-
ing physicians to inflate the num-
ber of deaths during the pandem-
ic, issuing wildly flawed tests and
terrorizing people into giving up
their freedom with the mask
mandates. The message spread
quickly on social media.
“There’s no evidence there’s
even a novel, separate virus,” Bu-
kacek, 63, falsely told an inter-
viewer last fall, wearing a white
lab coat in the waiting room of
her clinic, Hosanna Health Care.
“And the CDC admits it.”
On Facebook last month, she
called the suicides “all predict-
able and predicted” because of
pandemic prevention efforts
pushed by Democratic politi-
cians. “How ab out the isolation,
masking and other mechanisms
of fearmongering promoted in
the last year and a half?” sheschools for failing to impose dress
codes and discipline, against par-
ents for not securing their plenti-
ful firearms — used in several
suicides — and against the sup-
porters of masks and other pan-
demic restrictions for stifling
teenagers. An issue the valley
might have rallied around, in
another time, risked dividing it
yet again.
“Our community is going
through a divorce right now,”
Mark Johnson, the mayor of Kal-
ispell, told local officials gathered
at city hall to find a path forward
from the tragedies, recounting a
high school student telling him
the hostility around him was a
reminder of his parents. “The
adults are arguing about what’s
right and what’s wrong,” he said
in an interview. “The kids are
watching it happen. They don’t
feel they’re on firm footing.”
It has been more than a year of
discontent in the Flathead Valley,
as national passions that erupted
during the Trump presidency and
its aftermath struck home in this
expanse of crystalline lakes and
Douglas firs at the base of the
Rocky Mountains less than an
hour’s drive from Glacier Nation-
al Park in northwest Montana.
Hostility over the November
election, the coronavirus and so-
cial movements have left a t rail of
bad blood among old-school Re-
publicans, backers of the former
president, increasingly vocal
Democrats and out-of-state
transplants, convu lsing every-
thing from the school district and
the public library to daily interac-
tions.
This is no longer the place
people here felt they knew, with
its pride in a civil style of inde-
pendence, not just from Washing-
ton but from animosity. Local
businesses, politicians and ordi-
nary people now find themselves
navigating angry confrontations,
and a nuanced political tradition
of splitting tickets on Election
Day has given way to partisan-
ship that propelled a Republican
sweep of races for governor, presi-
dent and Congress in November
for the first time in two decades.
Even the Independence Day
parade shifted this summer from
a once-revered slice of Americana
to another battle in a culture war.
As thousands packed Main Street
in Kalispell, the 26,000-popula-
tion county seat, the Flathead
Democrats’ float with a rainbow
gay pride flag was heckled the
length of the parade. A horse-
drawn wagon bearing a “Trump
2024 No More Bulls---” flag
rushed toward it, leading the
Democrats to fear injury. Some-
one smashed the plate glass win-
dow of a bookstore along the
route, then crumpled the gay
pride flag displayed inside.
The parade grew out of the
wildly popular run of Kruise Kal-
ispell, a Friday night car flotilla
down Main Street that Monte
Klindt, a local business owner,
honchoed with a friend last
spring to relieve locals’ boredom
during the coronavirus shut-
down. It, too, turned some nights
into a rolling display of political
animus, leaving Klindt to police
hateful comments on the Kruise’s
Facebook page. “During my life-
time, I don’t remember it ever
being this bad,” he said. “There’s
no middle anymore.”
Politics has animated Tammi
Fisher for most of her adult life,
and ever since Bill Clinton’s affair
turned her away from the Demo-
cratic Party, she’s been a con-
servative Republican.
No one would mistake the out-
spoken former Kalispell mayor
for a big-government liberal. But
Fisher, 45, is aghast at what her
party has become as Montana’s
tradition of political independ-
ence gives way, as she sees it, to
being just another Trump red
state.
“The extremists have stolen
everything,” she said. Fisher is a
Montanan whose grandfather
worked for the Great Northern
Railway. Widowed with a young
son at 31, s he was practicing law
downtown in 2009 when she ran
for mayor, and served one term as
a fiscal conservative. She gov-
erned with a suspicion of Wash-
ington common in Montana, op-
posing, for example, federal mon-
ey to upgrade the municipal air-
port.
Fisher had “an open mind” to
Trump, whose pledge to roll back
federal regulations in Washing-
ton resonated, she said. But she
soon felt a sense of dread that the
local Republican committee,
where she was an active member,
was using Trump’s popularity to
enable a fringe to flourish.
One major provocation, she
said, came when the committee
chairman told members at a 2 018
meeting they could not publicly
endorse any primary candidates
the local party was not support-
ing. “They were lurching toward
authoritarianism,” she recalled.
Ultraconservatives newly in
power backed two candidates for
state of fice in 2020 with misde-
meanor criminal records. One
was Greg Gianforte, who pleaded
guilty to a charge of assaulting a
MONTANA FROM A
In Montana, political polarization
overtakes civil style of independence
PHOTOS BY TONY BYNUM FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: Ten Commandments Park in Flathead County, Mont.
ABOVE: Former Kalispell mayor Tammi Fisher, a
Republican, records her “Montana Values” podcast. Fisher
is aghast at how “extremists” have taken over her party.Family physician Annie Bukacek, a member of Flathead County’s health board, has become the
face of the coronavirus resistance, railing at board meetings against quarantines and masks.